W. D. Howells

[1837 - 1920]

By Edward S. Martin

WHEN
Mr.
Howells died we who have been his
readers might have said that we had lost a friend
and entertainer never to be replaced. But we
haven't lost him. He has merely stopped work. We
have what he did in wonderful measure. If he had
been a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, a man of
business, even a clergyman, there would be left
his reputation, his descendants, his accumulated
property, if there was any, and his touch upon the
lives he influenced and helped, but the great body
of his daily achievement would be gone. But
because he was a writer the important mass of his
work lives on, accessible and consoling, a long
row of books--seventy-five, or thereabouts--on
library shelves all over the land and beyond the
sea, and his spirit, his mind, the sound of his
voice, the play of his thought and fancy in every
one of them.

His life
was the daily working of his mind. To
record its operations was his task and his
pleasure. It was a smooth-flowing life, but that
was because he was so orderly a man, and found his
vocation so early and was so happy in it, and
pursued it with such undistracted diligence. He
was not distracted even by the process of
education, which, as a rule, is expected to
separate its victim from whatever past and habits
he had, and make a new man of him. Mr. Howells
never had that sort of education. He was not sent
away to school, he never went to college. He had
in childhood in Ohio a great educational agent in
his family, so that it might be said that he
proceeded almost from the cradle to the printer's
case, and began putting types together to make
words, and words together to make sense. He did
not go out, like Thackeray, to lose a patrimony in
a prodigal pursuit of experience of life, or sail
the seas as Conrad did, to study moods of men and
nature. Life was everywhere for the taking. Why
should he chase it? He looked around and began to
put into words what his senses noticed and his
mind told him. His adventures were mainly
adventures in thought.

So he
learned in Ohio to write, and to get his
writing into print, and also, in a way, to bring
it to market. But, having got what training he
could out of newspapers and political writings, he
cut loose from them and set out boldly to be, not
a newspaper man, but a man of letters. That was
what it meant when he went to Cambridge and then
to Venice. He could print his thoughts, but he
needed better thoughts. Having learned well
enough to start with what a writer most needs to
know, he proceeded to add to knowledge.

And of
course he did add to knowledge in
Cambridge, and still more in Venice, where art and
history await folks in their waking hours and soak
into them in their sleep. Even a lazy man, if he
could keep his eyes open, would haVe got something
out of Venice, and Howells had not a lazy bone in
him. His business in life was to be a writer, and
as all his life he attended remorselessly to that
business, we may be sure he did so in Venice. He
did not overdo it either there or elsewhere. He
took time to be happy. He lived long and worked
to the very end, but in the work he lived by he
was almost as methodical and exacting with himself
as Anthony Trollope was, making nulla dies
sine linea his motto, and living well up to
it. He was provident, prudent, persistent; when
doggedness seemed necessary to do it, he could be
dogged.

He had
in remarkable measure the pleasures,
rewards, and satisfactions that come to authors,
and because of the
qualities just mentioned he avoided the
misfortunes and discomforts that have befallen
some of them. He was a wise man and knew how to
live, and he was admirably self-governed and hated
"irregularities." Perhaps if he had
hated them less he would have been a more shocking
writer, and more acceptable to readers who prefer
to be shocked; but that never troubled him. What
he sought was reality--to portray actual people as
they were and record faithfully their talk as they
spoke it, the development of their characters.
and the incidents that befell them. He stuck
close to this life and this world, and to so much
of what happened in it as came to his notice.
What he saw he pictured with an admirable and
charming art, and because his pictures are true
they will live.

He had
delightful and intimate friendships,
especially with persons of his own profession or
related to it, and notably with Mark Twain. He
must have loved to talk, he talked so well, but in
working hours he worked, and he loved his own home
and his own family, and could well bear the
company of his own mind.

The habit
of furnishing discourse to
printing-presses becomes established after a while
in a person who lives by that activity, so that it
ceases to produce much emotion. Nevertheless,
when one is so blessed as to do it better than
usual there is always a resulting glow, which is
the calling's great reward. In early years it is
apt ot be a glow of pride; in later ones it may be
a glow of something nearer to piety--of
thankfulness that it has been given him to say
something that seemed worth saying. Whatever Mr.
Howells thought about that, to him with his Welsh
grandfather and his Quaker grandmother, a sense of
the leading of the spirit--a sense that at his
best he was helped to something beyond the reach
of his unaided efforts--cannot have come hard.
Certainly his spiritual inheritance from his
paternal grandparents was very good for him as a
writer, bringing him powers of seeing life as it
is, and doubtless helping to account for the
gentleness of his relations with mankind. In the
long run pretty much all the distinctions that can
come to an author in his lifetime came to him.
Doubtless it gave him pleasure to be held in honor
and affection, but it never made him vain. When a
book of his was a "best seller" he was
delighted, but he never was one of those who aim
to find out what the great book-devouring public
wanted, and give it to them. What he gave the
public was what was given to him. He never
grudged labor, he never did less than his best,
but the picture he has left behind is of a man who
duly fed his mind and was fed by it--of a man who
looked at his world and listened to it and thought
about it, and wrote down what it said and how it
looked to him.

He liked
the simple life and lived it.
Possibly the rural Ohio of his youth stayed always
in the back of his mind. He was full of simple
kindliness, of helpfulness and encouragement to
beginning writers, of appreciation that tended,
perhaps, to be over~appreciative of aspirants
whose hopes have been less lavishly fulfilled than
his own. He read diligently the notable novels of
foreign writers, and did much to bring the best of
them, especially of the Russian and the Spanish
novelists, to the notice and appreciation of his
own countrymen. He lived to be the leading man of
letters the United States. And his leadership was
acknowledged with great good-will and affection.
After all, the world likes a good man and rejoices
in him, especially when he does honor to his
vocation.